In India's Assam state, citizenship law may hurt BJP's prospects

Three months ago, Jadav Das was among the men from the northeastern state of Assam who staged a naked protest in front of the parliament building in New Delhi.

They stood, holding a banner that read, "No citizenship on the basis of religion. Scrap the Citizenship Amendment Bill (CAB), 2016", referring to the contentious bill pushed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi's government.

The bill that would grant citizenship rights to undocumented non-Muslim immigrants, sparked protests in the country's northeast region that is home to a large immigrant population. Last year, nearly four million people were left out of the draft National Register of Citizens in Assam.

But critics say that Modi's Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) - which runs the government both at the centre as well as in Assam state - wants to amend the citizenship law to accommodate Hindu immigrants.

Das, who runs a cloth business in Narayanpur, a town in Lakhimpur district in upper Assam, said the protest was so effective that the bill could not be passed in the Rajya Sabha (the upper house of parliament).

There's no trace today of the anger that made him strip in the New Delhi winter. He is now an enthusiastic campaigner for the BJP. He left his organisation, the Anusuchit Jati Yuba Chatra Parishad (AJCP), which represents Dalit or Scheduled Caste students, and formally joined the Hindu nationalist party on April 6.

"We were brainwashed back then about the havoc of foreigners that CAB will wreak on Assam," Das told Al Jazeera.

"But Bhaskar Gogoi [a senior state BJP leader], explained how CAB will not affect our jaati [community], bhasha [language] and sanskriti [culture]," he said.